3. Silence is Golden, Speech is Silver: Corporeality, Sensuality, and “Pornography” in Russian Literature of the Silver Age

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the works that made sexualities and eroticism central to their denunciation of Russian utopian thinking in its inextricable link to pathologizing sex for pleasure. It discusses the Aleksandr Pushkin's proto-modern tale Golden Cockerel laid the foundation for a counter-tradition, in which anti-utopianism invariably went hand in hand with relatively open-minded discussions of sex and corporeality. The chapter discusses a Golden Age text - Pushkin's tale Golden Cockerel - as a formative anti-utopian manifesto of Russian letters and then turns directly to some most emblematic works of such Silver Age authors as Fyodor Sologub, Leonid Andreyev, Mikhail Kuzmin, and Mikhail Artsybashev, as well as dwell on female literary discourses of sexual freethinking of the period. It sheds light upon the futility of applying the term pornography to literary works: it is emblematic that the first analysis of its meaning for literary studies belongs to Vladislav Khodasevich, a major Silver Age poet.Keywords:Fyodor Sologub; Leonid Andreyev; Mikhail Artsybashev; Mikhail Kuzmin; pornography; Russian literature; Silver Age